Jaded, but remembering

Decided on light reading. Going to hit Treasure Island next. Have not read Robert Louis Stevenson since fourth grade, in hospital, when my Aunt Diane brought me a copy of Kidnapped. And I loved her for it.

Digging the overly-descriptive chapter names: "How my sea adventure began" and "The fall of a chieftain" ... dryly ironic to the postmodern ear, so fun for a kid.


______


"The entire project ... it was being shut down."
~People Pie

Wait … Politics is (Gasp!) Interesting?!

Yes, politics is interesting.

So interesting in fact that some very intelligent and motivated people – doctors, lawyers, business leaders, and military officers – spend much of their careers at it, up to and including their final breaths. You might not know from talking to your spouse, friends, family, or from chatting on Facebook or watching pop media talk shows why politics is so damn interesting, but I’m going to tell you. It’s interesting because it involves so many elements, overlapping, intertwined, and dynamic to the point of volatility. These elements include:

·         History – from Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man or the Federalist back to Polybius’ account of the inevitable evolution of various forms of government, including democracy, history forms the basis for our Republic and is constantly re-evaluated with new information and perspectives.

·         Economy and culture – micro or macro views vary dependent upon one’s socio-economic, cultural, and historical position. For some, “capitalism” is the ability to open a small shop with an American flag out front, free or nearly free of government intervention; for others it means taxpayer funded bailouts and shipping jobs overseas. Marxist views may seem foreign to some, based on a time of “hard” industrialization with references to a plutocratic, class-based feudal structure, while others see many of those systems still firmly in place.

·         The chess match of negotiation and positioning – many of my conservative peers and family saw President Obama’s “tax compromise” of December, 2010 as a sign of moving toward some relative middle, while my liberal friends saw it as a sign of weakness, a sell-out following the Democratic losses of the previous November. I saw it as putting the pieces in place to run his 2012 presidential race on the issue of taxes, where Republicans are soft even among their base. Regardless, every apparent move can have multiple purposes, planned consequences, and unintended consequences.

·         Public relations and campaign finance – most of us have heard the platitude, often associated with the Josef Goebbels, that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. But the same goes for the truth! Lies, fiction, truth, honesty are moral concepts that have little to do with how things actually operate (or with outcomes) in a system. The point is any concept needs relayed to people many times over, preferably within the context of a believable narrative, in order for ideas to take hold. That means money, and oftentimes the largest contributors need a very different set of ideas, a very different narrative, than the majority of constituents. That is one hell of an interesting juggling act right there!

None of the aforementioned attributes to politics stands alone in a vacuum. They interact, intertwine, and meld sometimes to the point of being indistinguishable. In fact, the more they intertwine in some meaningful way, the better for those seeking office as the narrative becomes uniform and consistent. And none of these attributes exists in objective space. Any postmodernist or communications or PR specialist will tell you that one’s own perspective will influence how each of these attributes takes on meaning.

That is to say, opinion enters the mix.

Most of what we call “politics” – what we hear talking to our spouse, friends, family, or from chatting on Facebook or watching pop media talk shows – not only admits to an element of opinion, but it wallows in it. With no interest in understanding each other, coming to agreement, or learning the first thing about history, economy, culture, negotiation and positioning, or even public relations and finance, political discussion devolves into a statement of opinion for no purpose other than to have that opinion reinforced by others. A thumbs up, a like, a little treat for that release of dopamine associated with a “correct” answer and acceptance. Or, on the contrary, that mini-adrenaline rush from getting into a good argument.

"Republicans are racist!"

"Liberals are lazy!"

It’s as interesting as hearing again and again that the color blue is prettier than the color red. Or vice-versa. It’s not interesting. Not the twentieth time. Not the tenth. Not particularly the first. Which is a shame.

Because politics is interesting.

And in a pluralist, constitutional Republic … it’s vital.

On Happiness

Remember when you were a kid, how your silliest friends would put you in an equally outrageous mood? Something as simple as making a sandwich could turn into a fiasco, cheeks turned red with tears in your eyes from laughter.

It’s not so different as an adult. If you want to learn about biology, you take a class and surround yourself with those equally passionate on the subject. Hikers and campers meet fellow hikers and campers, and if you like drugs, you likely have addicts for friends. The same applies to happiness.

Our culture, and to an extent popular religion, teaches us to look within. “We can only make ourselves happy” you might hear on Oprah. We can only save ourselves. But when our friends and lovers are joyless – when they dwell on the negative and turn into unhappy, inhibited lumps where the world always seems against them – we tend to feed on that. Friends and lovers share their actions and thoughts, as they should, and so we consume their negativity as they reflect our own. It’s a mutual damaging cycle, and one that is hard to break. Only in our more reflective times do we realize it’s happening at all, because friends and lovers find pleasure in each other’s company – even when that pleasure is self-pity, anger, and despair.

So goes the saying, “Misery enjoys company.”

To say that the key to happiness is simple does not mean that it is easy to find. Just as most drunks have at least one drinking buddy, and most negative people share their unhappy views of the world with a close lover or friend, happy people tend to have happy friends. Friends who are some arrangement or recipe of enthusiastic, silly, outrageous, and willing to learn and try new things. Active people. Explorers. We see the world through the eyes of those we choose to be close to, and an impossible task begins to look surmountable when our friends are those who are willing to try … and try with good humor and a smile. Happiness is, at least in good measure, physiological.

When our friends play soccer, hike, bike, or take long walks, we find ourselves joining them. When they eat well instead of eating garbage, we join them for lunch. When they order an orange juice instead of beer, we begin to find ourselves ordering healthy too. We don’t smoke around our non-smoking friends, but we do laugh and play and get outdoors with them. We begin to spend less time fretting over the things beyond our control, and we grab onto those things where we can make a difference. We might volunteer at nursing home with them. We might go into business with them instead of griping about the boss.

Happiness is simple for most. That’s not to say that it is easy – at first, it may require a level of discipline with which you are not well-acquainted. But it is simple. It can’t fill thousands of hours of talk-show gibberish or sell millions of self-help books or even pamphlets filled with platitudes. Happiness is behavioral. It’s the company we keep, the activities in which we partake, and the food and drink we choose to consume. And it is, for most people, very effective.

Enlightening Day at Work

How lucky - because how many people do I know who could call their work day "enlightening" -?

Most folks complain about their boss, their husband, their girlfriend. People you work with talk about the party they went to over the weekend, their fraternity, or maybe a vacation with the family.

What they ate. Who's a "bitch" at the apartment pool. It gets like Facebook from there.

What if someone actually cared how to improve a roadway? Or how to make the off-the-shelf robot you're demonstrating run better? What if they got you excited because they actually knew how to talk to strangers rather than their comfortable social circle?

It started 3 or 4 months ago when I ran a camp for disabled kids. I got annoyed, because half the kids in the camp weren't disabled at all. They were the brightest, most enthusiastic and dedicated people I'd met in years. They had interests. Most importantly, we motivated each other and got things done. They had no disabilities at all, and I actually questioned our organization's purpose. I actually got angry.

Turns out, going through data for a grant to renew the project, that they were diagnosed autistic, Asperger syndrome, and the all-encompassing "spectrum."

Here I am again, recruiting. The man I worked with today was very up-front about his late life Asperger syndrome diagnosis. I'm no diagnostician. I'm certainly not a teacher. All I know is that he brought me out of my shell again, first time in months, and we increased our recruitment by sixfold over yesterday. This is in between talking about the benefits of Kindle over paper publishing, computers, and public relations.

I don't understand quite the benefits of normalcy. You get more friends that way I think, but not necessarily the prettiest girl. You get more pats on the back by your inferiors, more parties, but not necessarily the promotion. I don't see the benefit. At all.

If I'm running my own small business in a few years, I do know who I will hire. Because a little dedication, creativity, and seriousness about what matters for people in general seems a whole lot more important than what matters for *you* at a given second - the fraternity, the party, the girlfriend.

SmashWords

Really feel I've found a home here, all my books, social media, author profile in one place. :-)

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/bryanlindenberger

Made Her

It's not that she was gorgeous.

She was simply pretty - pretty in that way that if she'd shown up a Star Trek convention, the nerds would've lined up to talk to her.

White button up shirt, heavy black glasses, and Asian. A sandal dangled from her big toe, legs crossed in a loose skirt.

I'm not pandering. This is truly how God or a drunken night in Juarez made her.

People Pie - Now with breasts!

Never understood the "R" rating for exposed breasts.

By the time you're old enough to care, you either have them or spend half your time thinking about them anyway.

Sometimes both.


People Pie - website and trailer for the dark fantasy novel where frogs talk and the world is a circus (mild adult content and music by The Aleph)